The EU Horizon 2020 has launched Bio4Comp, a five-year €6.1M project to build more powerful and safer biocomputers that could outperform quantum computing. 

The Bio4Comp project has the ambitious goal of building a computer with greater processing speed and lower energy consumption than any of the most advanced computers existing today. Ultimately, this could translate into enabling large, error-free security software to be fast enough for practical use, potentially wiping out all current security concerns.

A total of €6.1M have been awarded to an European team of researchers from TU Dresden, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Lund University, Linnaeus University and Bar Ilan University, as well as the British company Molecular Sense.

"Practically all really interesting mathematical problems of our time cannot be computed efficiently with our current computer technology," says Dan V. Nicolau from Molecular Sense, who had the original idea of harnessing the power of biomolecules to build better computers. The team plans to solve this problem by scaling up its first biocomputer prototype, whose mechanisms have been published in the journal PNAS.